by Tricia Dower
We watched Pilipaza appear below with her trowel and heavy gloves, watched her show her tag to a soldier who waved her on to the plots at the back of the building. Ada rose and followed her. Later, Pilipaza said she had invoked Elder Council privilege and ordered Ada to join her in the garden. “She misses you,” was all she would say about their conversation.
The soldiers left after a week, replaced by police officers checking tags at each entrance. Others in air scooters hovered over the sidewalk and streets, ensuring we got into the proper shuttles. Sky watchers. Helmeted birds of prey.
“Every vandal and bike thief must have floated out to sea,” Adero said. “The police seem to have nothing else to do.”
“They can’t keep this up,” Gruzumi said. “When they relax their guard, we should be ready.”
To do what?
For weeks we woke expecting sympathetic Rainbows to speak out in outrage over our situation and the Elder Council to come up with a resistance plan. But the “snow flakes” were mute, and the Elder Council couldn’t agree on a single action despite many meetings at the gardens. The matter-of-fact way Pilipaza reported their indecision clawed at my insides, Gruzumi’s too. They needed more information, she said, needed us to gather intelligence about what Gruzumi began calling the Occupation.
At the desalination plant where Gruzumi backwashed filters and removed Asian green mussels that clogged the intake pipes, he learned the government had hired an advisor from Mid-Norte. A surge of immigrants from deluged Caribbean islands had made disruptive demands there and almost gotten away with it. At a different plant, Katsi ran a machine that filled and sealed pouches of drinking water for export. She heard someone say if there were fewer of us there’d be room for more skilled refugees from ravaged countries. Miracle makers, we laughingly called them, who’d resurrect a world of boundless water, food, and fuel.
I approached a student named Siri. Black hair, skin the colour of wild chanterelles. The closest I had to a colleague, having been paired with her in the food lab. I watched her enter the classroom and look around with a confidence only the Rainbows had, waited until she took a seat and slid in next to her. “Seems police headquarters has relocated to the Village,” I said with a short laugh, as if it were inconsequential. “What have you heard about it?”
Lying next to Gruzumi that night I told him Siri had looked at her shoes when she said it cost a fortune to police our protest. Looked at the ceiling when she said her father told her they couldn’t afford to let us get out of hand again.
“What’s that mean, out of hand?” Gruzumi said, stroking my arm with his thumb.
“Blocking traffic, apparently, trampling the Parliament lawn – that shrine to turfgrass. She hadn’t heard about the shields, and I could tell she didn’t believe me.”
Gruzumi looped an arm around me and pulled me over so my head was on his chest.
“Siri says we have it pretty good. Says, nobody gives them a home for nothing. When I told her we pay with our labour, she reminded me I wasn’t working and didn’t have to pay for the program like she did.”
Gruzumi laughed when I told him I said it wasn’t my fault she couldn’t have a swimming pool. “Wait, there’s more,” I said. “When she said there’s no room for anyone else because of us, I said anyone else would be better off migrating into space since most of the island will be under water soon. She looked scared, like she believes what they say about us being psychic, or is it psycho?”
Gruzumi was laughing harder, now, and I was laughing a little, too, but also crying, getting his chest hair wet.
“What is it?” he said.
“She didn’t look at me once until I mentioned the island going under water.”
“They never really see us, anyway,” he said.
Ada showed up one evening, her arms full of books, laughing at the surprise on our faces.
“I thought you’d want these,” she said. Poetry volumes I’d rescued from shredding. Other relics, too – big books with shiny pictures of pineapples and flowering ginger, rhinos, and penguins. Images of things I would never see. Pictures to show my children someday.
“I wasn’t able to carry them all. I can bring more another time.”
It had been a few weeks since I’d seen her and, then, only a quick visit in the gardens. Barefoot, my hair hanging loose, I wondered if I looked too much at home, if it would hurt her feelings. But her smile gave no such feeling away.
“The guard is gone from the lobby?” Adero said.
“No, no, I got a permit. Turn in your ID tag for this and you can go anywhere you want. They injected it with a syringe.” Ada held out her arm to show us a disk, no larger than a grain of rice, embedded in the skin just above her left wrist.
“Welcome, Adawalinda,” Katsi said. “Sit with us.”
Ada had been to Gruzumi’s before, but she made a show of looking for a chair. Adero set a cushion down for her between me and Asalie.
“Did it hurt?” Asalie said, lifting Ada’s wrist to get a closer look.
“No, they rubbed something on it first. It was over so fast, I hardly noticed it.”
“Why do we need it?”
“The reason they gave for the tags when we first got here,” Pilipaza said, “was we only have one name, too many the same.”
“It’s called the Digital Guardian,” Ada said. “It has my medical records in it. It’s for our safety, the police explained. Some hospitals use them.”
“Prisons, too,” Gruzumi said.
“More efficient than a tag,” Ada said. “You don’t have to change it whenever you move.”
“Yeah, because it tracks you,” Gruzumi said. “They know where you are all the time. They know you’re here.”
“Can they use it to shock you?” I asked. My bowels were beginning to cramp.
Adero stood and reached a hand down to help Ada up. “You must go.”
“Will I see you again?” Her lip quivered as her eyes pleaded with me. I knew she didn’t understand.
I walked her to the door, wanting to hug her, but afraid of what it would do to us. “Maybe in the gardens.”
For some time after Ada left, the silence was almost a presence needing its own cushion.
“I’m not getting one,” I whispered, finally.
“Can they hear you in the bathroom?” Asalie said.
Gruzumi pounded his fist into his hand, one, two, three times. “We need to take to the streets, burn everything we can, make the air foggy from fire,” he said.
“That is not our way,” Adero said.
“No, our way is surrender,” Gruzumi said, “but not for me anymore.”
“Zumi,” Katsi said, extending an arm out to him.
“Me either,” I said, getting up, standing beside him.
“Did you know,” Pilipaza said, “I once shot a goose from the sky?”
The next day on the shuttle I couldn’t stop looking at wrists. Don’t make a sound, I thought, but I couldn’t have, anyway. Something had knocked the sounds out of me, sucked out all my breath. I opened the window next to my seat and used my hands to shovel air into my mouth, not caring if anyone stared.
I stumbled down the shuttle steps, but my legs refused to take me to class. Inching along the building, I looked this way and that, sure someone was watching. Palpitations threatened to burst through my chest. I breathed deeply and concentrated on my unreliable legs. Thought about running away, following the wind farms that traced the coast, finding a hollowed out tree in which to live, if such a tree existed. Can you leave someone and still be with him? I could see Gruzumi knee-deep in brine, ears throbbing from the roar of the desalination membranes at full power, missing me. I tried not to think of our promise, but it was always there, like a hand at the back of my neck. I would have to make myself as angry as he was, a
ngry enough to be unafraid.
I slipped into the classroom, mouthing an apology for being late.
That night, my body was the hollowed out tree in which Gruzumi and I would live, my body our freedom. “It’s so warm inside you,” he said into my neck, and I knew I would not chew my morning after seeds.
31 AGM. To my newborn son, I say: your blood contains that of a man so courageous he took a knife to his wrist one night and dug out what they’d forcibly implanted. They sent him to prison on the mainland. I went a little crazy, I’m told. Ada came to live with us, to sleep on his side of the bed. When we got word he was dead, I would have died, too, if not for you. You filled me up, leaving no room for self-pity. The sheets were rusty with my blood when I pushed you out. You didn’t cry. You landed in Pilipaza’s hands all quiet and watchful. Your eyes were grey, your skin as pink as the patch on my hip, your hair more yellow than white. It’s an omen, Pilipaza said. He is the One who will guide us. No, I said, we will do it together, Gruzumi’s son and I. Katsi took the afterbirth out to the garden and returned it to Aaka Earth.
AKINTUNDE
He was nine when he first saw it in one of his mother’s old books, and it made him catch his breath: a photograph of Earth, taken from the moon a hundred or so years before, great islands of land swimming in a single ocean and peeking through swirling white clouds. Alive, full of knowledge.
“Is it Aaka Earth?” he asked his grandfather.
“Yes and no,” Aapa said. “The planet is only a shadow of Aaka Earth. Her spirit is the real world, not the one we see.”
“Are we shadows?”
“So I was taught.”
He had the vision after that: The Land’s sparkling whiteness, clean and beautiful, rising from the ocean.
45 AGM. Akin and his mother crouch behind a fence across the street from a house they’ve been scouting for months. The last occupied bungalow on a dead-end street in a dry part of the city. Two men in CONAV uniforms carry a body out to an ambulance: the old lady they haven’t seen in weeks. A few small bumps under a sea-green sheet pulled up to cover her face. Akin imagines her skin stretched thin as a fly’s wing, like Pilipaza’s two years ago when he was twelve and Aapa Adero slipped her body into the ocean, a bundle of rocks to weigh it down.
CONAV won’t be back for a few days, at least, to clean out the old lady’s house and nail the doors and windows shut. The ambulance gone, he and Mother creep around the side of the house, past vines of deep purple tayberries covering the weathered picket fence. Akin tears off a few and crushes them on the roof of his mouth. Juicy, sharp. The rest of the garden has gone to weeds.
“We’ll bring it back,” Mother says. “May have to guard it when the trouble starts.”
She means the chaos she expects when the last ship leaves the island and the Snows are on their own. The final evacuation of Rainbows, except for the deathly ill, is any day now, she’s sure, though there’s been no announcement and Rainbows have been fleeing the island for years. “Anyone can see tomorrow if they don’t lie to themselves about today,” she told him. “I knew when your father didn’t come home from work that day I’d never see him again.” Gruzumi, always Gruzumi. Akin never thinks of him as Father.
Except for the colour of the stucco and the occasional addition, every house on the street is the same. The back door leads to the basement and is locked from inside with a horizontal cross-hatch. Mother slides a crowbar between the door and the frame and lifts the hatch. “You this time?”
More a demand than a request, so he shrugs in agreement, though he should be the one standing guard. He’s the one who can pass for Rainbow. But she keeps testing him, keeps trying to find more daring in him than he possesses. His name means bravery returns in some other language. Akintunde. A pathetic echo of Gruzumi.
She hands him the cloth sacks. “I’ll get any tools in here and then be right outside,” she says. “Listen for my signal that someone’s coming.”
Akin knows the drill. Go through the house quickly, no gawking. Take stuff they can eat, wear, or burn. No knickknacks, no furniture. Don’t leave any drawer or cabinet so bare as to be obvious when CONAV comes back.
He tests the closed door at the top of the stairs to the main floor – unlocked – and hesitates for a long breath before pushing it open. All pets are supposed to be gone, shot by CONAV or let loose to run wild as game, but still. He steps into the kitchen and listens. Nothing. It reeks of death, but he won’t mention that to Mother. She claims his imagination keeps him from noticing things that might endanger him. She’ll insist he identify the source of the odour: mildew, rotting food, shit? Mother would say feces. The sea smells like hunger to him. To her, only of dimethyl sulphide.
The rooms are small and damp. He flicks a light switch. Dead. No generator to search for. He bags candles, holders, and matches. Hefts a large flashlight – it works! – and drops it into a sack. Cutlery, pots, and pans. Canned tomatoes. From the bathroom: towels, ointments, bandages, and precious, hard to find soap. By the front door: coats, rain boots, shoes, umbrellas. In a bedroom: blankets, sheets, underwear, sweaters, eye glasses, and half a dozen wooden frames with no pictures. The bed’s unmade, probably where she died. Look for weapons, Mother said. He checks every drawer for a gun, kneels to see under the bed, lifts the mattress.
In the last room he sucks in a sharp breath at the wall of books. Imagines Mother fingering the covers, slowly turning the pages, looking for half-blank pages or wide margins. She’s been scribbling poetry in her collection of old volumes since paper became scarce. Akin isn’t the greatest reader but he’s come across some of her sappy poems to Gruzumi from time to time. He flips through some books, bags four with white space.
“Look,” he says as he lugs the sacks outside. “Empty frames.” He pulls one out to show her. “They’ll burn good.”
She takes it, turns it around in her hand. “I don’t have one picture of your father,” she says like it was his fault. Sometimes he thinks he can’t bear her loss another day.
She didn’t finish school because of him. Ada told him that one day after he’d been mouthy. They dropped her from the program when she got pregnant with him. “You should show more gratitude.” But even at his most grateful, he can never be Gruzumi.
His thoughts must slip away for a minute because Mother taps him on the arm. “Little boy,” she says. “The neighbourhood’s clear. Let’s go.”
She lugs a few bags to the fence, throws them over into the next garden. Akin does the same.
“The old lady had guts,” he says, hoisting himself over the fence, “staying here by herself.”
“Probably had no choice.” Mother waves his hand away as she clears the fence, a lot of spring still in her legs.
“There’s a chair by the fireplace I wish we could take.”
“Too much comfort breeds a lazy mind,” she says, then gives him her half-bitten, tight smile and squeezes his arm. She isn’t serious. He’s never sure.
They stow the bags in the house next door, one they commandeered months before. It’s easy enough to pry the boards off a basement window; CONAV always does a half-assed job. They check around to be sure all is as they left it. Especially the big finds: fishing gear, four bicycles, two canoes, a kayak. Every house on the street now has liberated goods, waiting for them to move in. They’ll share the houses with other Snows, but his family will be in charge, making sure everybody has something essential to do: gather wood, build fires, boil water, plant, weed, harvest. When the jobs disappeared, some people got sluggish and gave into worry. “They need work and routine to feel in control again,” Mother says. She and Akin will give them that. Some days he wakes with a proud heart, anticipating how thankful they’ll be.
Vacant houses closer to the Village are too soggy to live in, black smudgy water stains on the walls like dirty hand prints. Their owners stripped them
of the best stuff before the high water took them. During low tides, he and Mother pry up warped floor boards and take them to dry out in the houses they already think of as theirs.
On the way home, they stop for peas and strawberries at the hilltop garden, the closest one to the Village that isn’t flooded. The vines are picked clean.
“Greedy bastards,” Mother says. “They’ve lived like children too long. I almost welcome what’s coming.”
The government stopped harvesting when the waters rose. Mother expected the Elder Council to step in, but they’ve lost their voice. She calls them the Dead Ones.
From atop the hill they can see the ocean and water two metres deep that surrounds the Village like a moat, the wooden catwalks like drawbridges. They can see clear down to the harbour, too, and the fancy dome of Old Parliament sticking out of the water. Flooding will be worse come winter. Mother says it’s due to atmospheric pressure and the relative positions of the earth, moon, and sun. But Akin believes the tide is freer to act than that. It has a greedy appetite, creeping in to eat away at bricks and plaster, leaving slimy green spit as it creeps out again.
“If we don’t bring anything,” he says, “they’ll ask what we’ve been doing.”
Mother doesn’t appear to hear him. She’s staring out at the ocean. “They never returned his body. How do I know he’s dead?”
After Pilipaza died, he watched the ocean every day for months, half expecting the tide to bring her back. Hoping it would. When he had the vision about The Land, Pilipaza didn’t say he imagined it. “My father’s spirit journeyed where others’ did not,” she said. “You have his gift.”
He would never watch for Gruzumi. What’s so brave about digging a hole in your wrist? Maybe Akin will do the same one day if it impresses his mother so much. No one scans the stupid monitors anymore, anyway. The government’s gone, the island handed over as a base for the naval forces of the Coalition of Pacific Republics. CONAV. His friend Zunar says it in a phoney deep voice, dragging out the second syllable – CONAAAV – and Akin pretends to tremble with fright.